Low pitch is masculine and a grandmother?!
How would you describe this sound? Does it evoke any word associations? Is it, perhaps, high? Would you say that it sounds more blunt than sharp or vice versa?
Metaphors are no strangers to our everyday life.
Even without realizing, we use metaphors on a daily basis: time is
money, heart made of gold, someone being an early
bird/night owl…
For the majority of us, another essential part of the human experience
is hearing. Hearing is said to be the most abstract
sense out of the human senses, so naturally, listening to music is
quite a unique experience. That is why we tend to borrow words
and metaphors that originate from other senses to talk about
music.
If you are still reading this text, it is safe to assume that you are a
proficient speaker of English. Then, you are probably familiar with
high-low metaphor that is widely used in English, among
other European languages, such as Russian and Dutch,
to describe sounds of the opposite pitch. Interestingly, although this
verticality metaphor seems to be the prevalent one, it is
not universal across all 6,500+ languages that
exist.
For instance, in Balinese (spoken in Bali), pitch is
small or large. In Gbaya
language family, that consists of dozen various languages from the
western Central African Republic, pitches are arranged
genealogically, so high-pitched sounds are called a
granddaughter and low-pitched - a
grandmother. Alternative metaphors include
feminine – masculine, rough – smooth,
thin – thick, among many others.
All of these diverse metaphorical pitch descriptions might sound
foreign and a bit baffling. But what if I told you
that you would probably apply these metaphors to high- and low-pitched
sounds in the same way as a native speaker? That is, if presented with a
low-pitched sound (imagine something like a heavy bass sound),
you would be more likely to describe it as masculine,
smooth and a grandmother than
feminine, rough and a
granddaughter.
Even if it sounds far-fetched at this point, I invite you to
click through the dashboard and see how I investigated
whether foreign metaphors are applied correctly to high- or
low-pitched sounds by English speakers!
Sounds and Metaphors: Research through a Survey
With this research, I wanted to check whether the foreign
metaphors are applied to high- and low-pitched sounds in the same way as
they are in the language of origin. To test that,
English-speaking participants were asked to listen to a high- or
low-pitched instrumental music excerpts and
judge whether the word presented on the screen
afterwards is related or unrelated to the sound.
Please feel free to take a short demo version of the
survey by scanning the QR code on the left or
clicking the link!
In theory, participants are expected not only to correctly
answer whether the word matches the sound or not, but also answer
faster when the word is indeed related to the heard sound. This
phenomenon, called the semantic priming effect, is seen in language
experiments. For example, when one reads or hears the
word dog, other words associated with
dog, such as leash, cat, food, come
to mind, not puzzle, case and gum.
The same principle can be applied to music: if you hear a
piccolo (one the highest-pitched instruments) solo and
then see the word thin, you should be able to
categorize the word as related to the sound without thinking
too much about it. Conversely, if you see the word
thick, it might require more time to process whether
the word is really related or not.
Results: Accurate, but not Fast. What Does it Mean?
As expected, participants could accurately judge whether the
metaphor is related or not to the audio. For example,
high-pitched excerpts were said to be thin and
sharp, but not thick and
blunt, that is in the same way as the sounds would be
described in the language of origin.
Unfortunately, people did not answer faster when the audio was
related to the word. So listening to a low-pitched sound prior to seeing
the word thick or blunt did not make people answer
faster than when they saw thin or sharp.
I found that participants agreed on what is the right metaphor
and what is the wrong metaphor to describe a high/low-pitched
sound. Therefore, we might be born with all of these various
pitch descriptions in our minds, but we just do not use all of
them in our native languages. However, when needed, like in the case of
completing an experiment, we can use those words as if they are present
in our native language.
Also, music might evoke certain word-associations after we listened to
it, but they are not as strong as if we were to match word to word.
Perhaps, the words knife and sharp are more related in
our mind than a piccolo playing and “sharp”.
My study showed how multifaceted human cognition is even when it comes
to such seemingly simple and even mundane tasks as musical pitch
processing. Taking my finding into consideration, figuring out the
precise brain mechanisms behind how pitch and our thoughts
interact is a puzzle to solve for future researchers!